Agricultural
engineers Eric Jackson (left) and Ron Haff hope to use x-ray images to develop
a sorting machine that detects olives damaged by the olive fruit fly. Click
the image for more information about it.

The device's X-ray technology would quickly capture images of the
freshly harvested olives as they tumble along a conveyer belt. Then, a software
program would enable a computer to scan the X-ray imagery and recognize
internal damage. The computer would activate a sorter that would follow the
computer's commands, correctly separating undamaged olives from their ruined
counterparts.

All this would improve the speed, precision, and accuracy with which
olive fly damage is today detected at processing plants. Right now, that chore
is mainly done by hand.

In preliminary experiments, the scientists have found that the
software program they're developing is able to recognize undamaged olives 90
percent of the time and severely damaged olives 86 percent of the time. The
scores demonstrate that the approach is valid--and that it needs more work,
according to Jackson. He expects to have the system ready for real-world
testing in a processing plant within a year or so.

Jackson and Haff are likely the first to study this promising use of
real-time digital X-ray imagery.